“I was thinking of getting out of here,” Erik said.
The man gave a sardonic snort. “They won’t let you walk out, that’s for sure.”
“You’ve tried, then?”
“No. No chance. They’ve done too much work on my legs.”
Erik looked down at himself. “Mine seem okay.”
“By the look of it they’re the only parts of you that are. Get back in bed before you fall down.”
“If I do, and I can’t get up, I’ll pull the alarm cord.”
“No one will come. You’re not worth their trouble.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s a green card on the clip-board at the end of your bed.”
“Ah, yes. I know about that. Low priority.”
“No priority,” the man said. “I’m in the same category. We’re both on the slippery end of the shit list. If they think you might still be – useful – to them in some way they’ll keep you alive, just, if you behave, but they won’t if you don’t.”
Slowly and cautiously Erik manoeuvred himself back onto the bed. “You certainly were right to protest about this place,” he said.
“You saw me, did you?”
“As I was coming in. You and a woman were by the main entry waving banners. She asked me to sign a petition.”
“That was my wife. She’s in here somewhere too.”
“Did they just grab you off the street?”
“They’re not that stupid. Unfortunately they’re not stupid at all. They invited us in to discuss our objections with Dr Stranghaver, one of the people in charge round here.”
“Had you any idea what this place was really like?”
“Of course not. How could we?”
Erik was silent for a while then said, “Do you belong to some kind of official protest group?”
“One that might send people out looking for us, you mean? That was one of the first questions Stranghaver asked. But no, Jenny and I were on our own. We don’t even have any official party political affiliations. When Stranghaver heard that, she asked us if we’d like some coffee. We’d been standing out front for hours, so we said yes. It tasted all right. That was three weeks ago, and I haven’t seen Jenny since, but they told me she’s here and I have no reason not to believe them.”
“Three weeks! That can’t be right. I’ve only been here eight days myself, and you must have come in after me.”
“Is that what they told you, eight days?”
“The woman from C and C said that.”
“I guess they like to keep us guessing,” the man with the boxer’s nose said. He flopped heavily back on his bed and shut his eyes. Not long after that he started snoring.
Perhaps the sound of this disturbed the man in the other bed because, without turning his head, he began to thrash about and punch the air feebly with one of his little fists, as though he was fending off some invisible invader hanging in the air above him. His arm was wrapped in bandages that had become loose and were starting to unfurl to reveal sections of pale flesh speckled with splotches the colour of a boiled lobster beneath. After a few moments he settled down and tugged the blanket back over his shoulder, but it continued to move urgently from time to time as though he were compulsively scratching himself. Since there was nothing else of the slightest interest to occupy his mind in the ward, Erik sat back and watched as the man with the large head and small body tackled his itch, causing the blanket up around his neck to edge, in fits and starts, back down in the direction of his chest. It had subsided two or three inches when Erik, who was beginning to doze, sat up suddenly because, for a second, something revealed itself from out of the edge of the blanket that could not have been part of the person under it, unless that person had previously kept hidden one grey, very hairy hand.
Whoever was in the bed grabbed at the blanket and pulled it hard down around his neck. There followed a brief burst of a soft but urgent chittering sound from the bed. The scratching motions intensified then stopped altogether, and a small dark, pointed head emerged a little way from under the bedding close to its occupant’s one visible ear, and took a look around. Erik felt, because it turned its lightly whiskered snout in his direction, it was looking at him with its beady, dull ebony eyes but it was impossible to tell from the blankness of its gaze what, if anything, it had focused its attention upon.
Erik shouted a curse and tugged at the large red bead on the end of his alarm cord.
The man he had been talking to earlier stopped snoring, spluttered, woke up and rasped out something incomprehensible. Then, composing himself, he said, “What’s the matter with you now? If you’re in pain, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“It’s not that. It’s him.” Erik pointed to the third bed. “There’s something in there with him.”
The man made no answer to this but stared quizzically at Erik who, he appeared to think, was acting in an over-excited manner.
“An animal of some kind,” Erik insisted. “A rat – I’m sure it was a rat.”
“Oh, another one of them. They come up from underneath the Victorian sections of the hospital. Ten years ago the Council shut the whole place down for a week and sent in an extermination team to try to scourge the building and get rid of them, but when they reopened, the pests were back in days. They breed in the cellars down below the hospital and it would cost a fortune to properly do anything about them nowadays: they’ve been used as warehouses for storing all kinds of junk for a hundred and fifty years. The Hospital Authorities occasionally make some pretence of making an effort to keep the rats down, or, more often, try to hush things up as best they can, but you know how the things breed. If whoever spent the money they wasted on the Samuel Taylor Unit had used it to replace those cellars with a modern storage system, the rats would have been driven out. That was one of the things my wife and I felt so strongly about. Why we were protesting.”
He spoke with swiftly rising anger that subsided as soon his final sentence ended.
Erik remembered the dark brown “seeds” he had discovered among the plants in the dome and put in the pocket of his jacket. Rat shit! The creatures must have developed a taste for the vegetation.
“But don’t the staff here poison them or lay traps?” he said.
The man seemed to find this amusing but he didn’t laugh. “You’ve been here long enough not to ask such foolish questions,” he said. “I doubt if the medical staff are aware that they’re there. You must have noticed they are all a bit . . . preoccupied.”
As he spoke, Erik noticed the rat, that had drawn its head back under the blanket when he had shouted, was re-emerging, this time with more confidence. It lifted its head, scuttled nonchalantly forward over the pillow at the end of the bed and, taking a route along the frame beneath that it was obviously familiar with, descended to the floor. Then, apparently in no hurry, lewdly rolling its fat rump from side to side as it stretched its back legs, it made its way across the shiny floor and made an exit by squeezing through a tiny gap at the bottom of the ward doors.
“Must have bones like rubber,” Erik’s companion observed. “Clever buggers too. They’ll get in anywhere.”
“I don’t want them in with me.”
“They won’t bother you yet. You’re too lively. So am I, just about, whereas him,” he pointed across at the figure concealed in the third bed, “he’s hardly moved for days, except when he panics in his sleep when they’re having a go at him. The rats can do anything they like with that poor sod. Anyone can, in fact. But you should be okay.”
Nevertheless, Erik spent the next few hours on high alert, with his eyes wide open.
Dr Stranghaver’s voice was different; more husky and less monotonous and mechanically correct. From the sound of it she had allowed herself to become somewhat excited about something.
She had been talking very quietly to someone on her mobile but now that call was over, she obviously felt impelled to give vent to some strong feelings.
“Everything changed,” she said, gripping her colleague – another man in a white coat, but much taller than the one that had previously accompanied her – by the shoulder and squeezing him hard with her crimsoned fingertips.
“Why?”
“I can’t go into details. No time for that. But something very serious has come up and a decision has been made by our sponsors. We’re going to be pulling in all of the successful self-referrals much sooner than we anticipated. Today, in fact.”
“Not every one of them, surely?”
“Well, obviously we’ll start with the red and blue categories.”
“The richest pickings.”
“Right. Get them established, then we’ll know how many of the yellows we can accommodate. The official prediction is there will be far too many of them, so we’ll select the best. Our Files and Statistics Department is running a cull on them now. But that’s not important at the moment. What matters is that we do everything we can to make ourselves available to welcome today’s intake.”
“Get them safely stashed away.”
“That’s the priority.”
“So there must be something very big in the air.”
“There has been for a long time, Professor Morgan, but now whatever has been hanging fire above us is going to drop and hit the ground. Today, according to the Intelligence Department.”
“It’s time to make our move.”
“Exactly. And we’ll be safe here, shut away as we will be with our hand-picked patients and with ample provisions for a long siege.”
“If it comes to that.”
Stranghaver pulled a rolled-up leaf from one of the plants in the dome from her pocket and took a few hungry bites.
“Oh, Professor Morgan,” she said, her voice ecstatic now, “if only you knew how much I hope it does. I would have unlimited scope to pursue my researches. It would be the culmination of my career.”
Erik had closed his eyes when she had come into the ward five minutes earlier, confident that no rodents would dare show their faces or take advantage of him while she was around. He was pretending to be asleep to discourage her attention, but that was not really necessary since, after taking her phone call, the doctor had obviously lost touch with her immediate surroundings and had gone off into a future world of her own imagining.
“Come along with me, Morgan,” she said flirtatiously. “I need you. All members of staff are to assemble in the dome at once. I’m going to give everyone their orders.”
As her voice faded, Erik opened his eyes. She was pulling the Professor along by the hand through the doors with an air of triumph, as though she were dragging him through the shallows after rescuing him from a sinking ship.
As soon as they were out of hearing, the former protestor on the other bed said, “Did you notice they mentioned red, blue and yellow cards, but said nothing about green ones?”
“That struck me too,” Erik said.
Neither of them found cause to continue their conversation after that for at least a couple of hours.
It was Erik who finally broke the silence. “What the hell is going on over there, do you suppose?” He pointed towards the third bed, where some violent activity was taking place under the section of blanket covering the bottom edge of the mattress.
“Rat again,” the man said.
“Must be a bloody big one.”
“You’re right,” the old protester agreed. “I didn’t think they got that big. What are you doing?”
Erik had swung his legs out of bed and started detaching the tubes and needles that had been stuck into him. “I’m going to take a look at that rat, if that’s what it is. Then I’ll see if I can do something for the poor bugger in there with it.”
“He’s past helping, believe me, and if you remove that equipment, you’ll soon end up in the same state. They’re keeping you alive, those tubes.”
Erik, unencumbered, stood up and walked unsteadily away from his bed. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said, “but I’m pretty convinced that Stranghaver will be ordering somebody to shut down our support machines anyway, and sooner rather than later.”
“The green cards, eh? That possibility crossed my mind.”
“It’s more than a possibility. You heard what she said. It’s inevitable.”
Erik reached the third bed without as much difficulty as he had anticipated and sat down on the end of it near where the commotion continued. He untucked a corner of the blanket from under the mattress and slowly peeled it back.
There were two rats under there; one on top of the other. The lower rodent was quite still and had what seemed to Erik to be a contemplative look of nun-like resignation on its face. The top one, that was doing all the furious humping and bumping bore, behind its whiskers, an expression that was very different. It stared up at Erik, opened its jaws, snarled once, then ignored him and got on with its work.
“There’s a pair of them,” he reported. “Both of them big. You can guess what they’re doing.”
“How is he, though?”
Erik pulled the blankets back further and peered down and under.
“Ah, Christ,” he said, his voice muffled by his left hand that had shot up involuntarily to clutch his mouth. He threw the blanket violently back down, scaring the rats off and away at last, and staggered to his feet.
“Not good?” said the protester.
“If he’s not dead he ought to be.”
After walking around the bed to the side its occupant was facing, Erik bent painfully down – it hurt a lot when he bent his torso forward – and stared at what was visible of the unfortunate man’s face.
“How does he look?”
Erik, speechless for the moment, shook his head.
“As bad as that, eh?”
“I thought he might be someone I know.”
“And is he?”
“I can’t be sure,” Erik said. “Probably not.”
He went and sat down on that part of his own bed that was not yet soaked in liquid draining from one of the pipes. He looked down at his body, naked except for the dressings on his chest and belly, and saw that the smaller holes that had been punched into him in various places were not bleeding as much as he had expected. A couple of them already appeared to be congealing. So far he didn’t feel too bad at all. Physically weak, yes, but his brain was clearer than it had been for a long time.
Almost unnoticed by Erik until now, an increasing amount of movement had been going on in the corridor outside the ward during the last half-hour, causing a rising clatter of noise and conversation. He was about to open one of the doors to take a look outside to assess just what was causing the hubbub, when both of them burst open in front of him and a porter’s trolley, loaded with large items of expensive-looking luggage, was hastily shoved in through the gap towards him. The man behind it, stooping low to get behind the weight of it, was unaware of his surroundings until he looked up to steer it into the place he’d chosen for it, against the wall and alongside Erik’s bed. The path the trolley took forced Erik to scamper awkwardly and uncomfortably back into a corner of the ward, but the porter couldn’t see him because he was a small man and the luggage was piled high. Fortunately, the trolley came to a stop a foot or so short of the wall. Erik had feared, if he’d been crushed by it, his stitched up wounds would have split open and he would literally have burst apart.
The porter retreated out onto the corridor, but returned at once with another similar load. As he barged through the door he shouted at someone on the corridor behind him, “There’s room for more in here.”
“That’s the idea,” a woman replied. “You can come back for them later, when we get round to impounding the possessions. Your most urgent task is to keep a way open along the corridor so we can keep the red cards moving through to the E wards.” It was Dr Stranghaver’s voice and she sounded as though she was enjoying herself.
Erik remained where he was for five minutes until the porter had crammed the ward full of over-laden
trolleys then, when the doors finally swung shut, he wormed his way up on to his bed.
The luggage heaped beside him showed every sign of having been packed in a hurry. Much of it had not been properly closed and locked, and a number of over-stuffed cases had sprung open in transit. Erik dipped into one of the nearest of these and found it contained the clothing of a large elderly woman. He pushed it aside and searched others at random. Most were full of more of the same, but he was astonished to find one of them – a leather case that had been merely zipped shut – was half-full of bank notes of high denominations in rubber-banded rolls. He was tempted but, reflecting that they were no use to him in his present position, he turned his attention to opening bags on one of the other trolleys.
His companion on the adjacent bed watched him for a while then said, “What are you up to? Thieving? You seem to know what you’re doing. Professional, are you?”
Erik didn’t bother to answer because he’d found what appeared to be just what he was looking for, a solution to his nudity problem: a case full of men’s clothing. He pulled out a pair of needle-cord trousers and laid them out along the length of his legs. They were an inch or so too long, but he decided to try them on. This proved to be an extremely difficult and painful operation. As soon as he bent his spine forward to draw them up, everything inside him howled with hurt and he shouted aloud. When the pain ebbed away he realised that the task was impossible in the position he was in. So he turned on his back, pulled his knees towards his belly and tucked his feet into the tops of the trousers. Then he stuck his feet into the air and moved them in such a way as to encourage the garment to descend towards him down the length of his legs.
When he had zipped himself in, the man on the next bed clapped his hands quietly and said, “That was well done. Bloody marvellous. You’re going to try to get out.”
“Now is the time, with all that confusion in the corridor.”
Erik had wriggled into a shirt, buttoned it partially, and pulled a jacket on over it. He gave up the idea of socks, but dropped some slip-on shoes onto the floor and forced his feet down into them as he stood up. He said, “It shouldn’t take too long for me to get to the old hospital. I’ll raise the alarm when I get there.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 41